“This is ridiculous.” He paused, considering their options. “All right. If we get jerked around one more time, we’re out of here.”
“I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.”
So was Quinn, but Helen was, in essence, a new client. And he often gave new clients more leeway than he usually would. “If she calls back, let me know,” he said and hung up.
He should have known this was a bad idea from the beginning. It wasn’t that Helen ran a shoddy shop—far from it. His few dealings with her so far had shown she was pretty buttoned up. But this was a sub-job, something she’d inherited from another agency that had overextended itself.
“I’m stuck with the team they already have in place,” she had told Quinn and Orlando during the briefing. “That’s why I want you there. I know I can trust you to make sure things go right.”
“We’re not fixers,” Orlando reminded her. “My people won’t be picking up the pieces if yours screw up.”
“I understand that,” Helen said. “I’m sure everything will go fine. But I’ll be able to sleep a lot better if I know at least one aspect of this project is handled by someone I trust.”
It was far too early in their still-budding working relationship for a do-me-a-favor assignment, but Quinn and Orlando had decided to go ahead with it. If nothing else, it was a little chit they’d have in their pocket if they ever needed one in the future.
But now it was getting to the point of the absurd, and budding relationship or not, these continued delays were increasing the risk of danger to Quinn and his team. That was unacceptable.
Outside, the glow of central Copenhagen blotted out the stars in the northern sky. The operation was taking place just south of the city, in a business district in the suburb of Albertslund. From his vantage point, Quinn could see several of the other warehouses and outlets and office buildings that made up the area, but could not see the actual op location. It was in the structure directly behind the one Quinn and his team were waiting in. When they receive the go signal, they would head outside and pass between the properties via a hole Nate had cut in the fence separating them.
The roads in this part of town were quiet, the lights in most buildings off. He thought there couldn’t have been more than a couple dozen people spread throughout the whole area, a situation that would change dramatically come the morning.
As the wind rumbled against the window, frigid air seeped into the unheated interior of the building, forcing Quinn to pull his coat tight and think about heading back to the relatively balmy room where the others were waiting. Before he could take a step, his phone rang.
The number on his screen was Winston’s. “Yes?” he answered.
“How quickly can you get back?” Winston asked.
“We never left.”
“Oh, excellent,” Winston said. “We’re a go.”
“You mean stand by.”
“No. Go. This is it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. He’s driving up now. ID confirmed.”
Quinn looked back outside. He couldn’t see any headlights, but the target was likely approaching from the other direction.
“We’ll call when we’re ready for you,” Winston told him. “Figure fifteen minutes.”
__________
WINSTON’S FIFTEEN MINUTES stretched to twenty-two. But at least when he called again, it wasn’t another “stand down.”
“All yours,” the op leader said. “Not quite where we had planned, but—”
“What do you mean?” Quinn said, his annoyance returning.
“Still on the second floor. It’s just that…well, you won’t miss it. We’re out of here.”
The line clicked off.
Quinn tried calling back, but was greeted with a message in Danish that he took to mean Winston’s phone had been turned off.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
“Problems?” Nate asked.
“Undoubtedly.”
Clean kits on their backs, the three men headed out one building and into the other. There they took the stairs up to the second floor—or, as the Europeans counted them, the first.
Quinn opened the stairwell door, not sure what to expect. The corridor immediately outside looked unchanged from the walk-through he and his team had done a day earlier: standard white walls and several closed office doors.
The designated op room was down an intersecting hallway near the middle of the building. Quinn led the way, passing more offices and conference rooms and storage closets. As they turned into the new hallway, all three men came to a sudden halt.
“Well, that’s different,” Daeng said.
“What the hell?” Nate asked.
Quinn narrowed his eyes, his lips pressing together.
There were two bodies, not one—the target and a man dressed in a security guard uniform. A gun lay near the guard’s body, meaning he’d had enough time to pull it out before being hit.
Per the mission brief, no guards should have been on duty in the building. Quinn was pretty damn sure that, despite Winston’s obvious deficiencies, the op leader would have notified him if that had changed. So had Winston been so clueless he’d been unaware the guard was around, or had this guy come with the target?
While Quinn couldn’t help but wonder what the answer was, ultimately it didn’t matter. The resultant mess was now in his team’s hands. As cleaners, it was their job to make the body—or bodies—disappear, and “clean” the scene so no one would know what had happened. The first task was the easier of the two. The bodies would be wrapped in plastic and carried out for disposal elsewhere. It was the second task that always proved more difficult, especially when a termination had not been carried out as planned.
“What were they thinking?” Nate said. “I count…” He paused. “Fourteen bullet holes. It was a damn shoot-out.”
“Carpet’s done for,” Daeng said, kneeling next to the bodies.
Quinn could see pools of blood stretching out from under each corpse.
This was why they always designated an operations zone where the situation could be contained and controlled—in this case, an unused office Quinn and his team had covered in a triple layer of plastic. If the job had been carried out correctly, a single bullet would have done the trick, dropping the target onto the plastic.
Simple. Sweet. No mess.
Instead, Quinn and his colleagues were left with a disaster—bullet holes in the walls, ruined carpet for which they had no replacement, and more blood splatter than they had paint to cover.
A good cleaner had hundreds of tricks he could use, ways of either making things look like nothing happened or diverting attention to some other catastrophe, such as a staged act of vandalism. The elite cleaners, of which Quinn was one and Nate was quickly becoming, had thousands. But there were those rare situations where no matter what level of abilities a cleaner had, only one possible solution existed.
Quinn looked at Nate and could see his former apprentice had reached the same conclusion.
“You want to do the bodies or would you like me?” Nate asked.
“You and Daeng handle them. I’ll get things set up here.”
While Nate and Daeng wrapped the body of the security guard with plastic from the unused op room, Quinn removed his pack and began pulling out the items he would need.
Over the years, he’d had to invoke this nuclear option less than a dozen times. It wasn’t a decision he ever arrived at lightly. Implementing it would often adversely impact people who had no connection to the target or anything the target had been associated with. But sometimes there was no choice.
Quinn grabbed the bottles of accelerant and doused the area around each bullet hole before doing the same to the bloodstains on the carpet. Once those areas were dealt with, he sloshed more along the hallway, down to the room where the op was supposed to have taken place. He then splashed liquid through each of the open doorways, emptying the first bottle and part of the secon
d.
By the time he made his way back, Nate and Daeng were tapping closed the plastic holding the original target. Quinn retrieved three timer-based igniters that were standard clean-kit equipment. Each was constructed mostly of cardboard with a few small plastic pieces, all sturdy enough to do the job but put together in a way that ensured the whole device would burn completely, leaving no evidence of its existence.
After they had all donned their packs and the wrapped corpses were lifted—one over Nate’s shoulder and the other over Daeng’s—Quinn placed one of the igniters directly over a patch of accelerant next to the largest of the bloodstains, and moved the switch into the ON position, giving them three minutes to exit the building.
As they moved down the hall, Quinn placed another igniter where the hallways intersected, and the final one halfway back to the stairwell. It was a shame they had to burn the whole building, but he couldn’t take the chance that the fire department would arrive in time to put out the blaze before all the evidence had been destroyed. A large fire would keep the crews from reaching the back of the building until it was too late.
Quinn, Nate, and Daeng had just passed through the hole in the fence when they heard a distant whoosh as the first igniter engaged, and by the time they were driving away in their van, Quinn knew the hallway was totally engulfed in flames.
Despite the fact they had to deal with two bodies instead of one, the disposal went exactly as planned. A forty-five-minute boat trip out to sea, weights securely wrapped and tied around each body, and slits cut into the plastic so that water and sea life could easily get inside. Then it was a simple matter of up and over.
As they motored back to shore, Quinn pulled out his phone and called Orlando again.
“Done,” he said when she answered.
“Done as in you bailed? Or done as in job completed?”
“Job completed.”
“Glad to hear it. Everything go smoothly?”
“Only if you consider a total burn-down smooth.”
She was silent for a moment. “Well, then, I guess I’ll set up a meeting for when you get back.”
“First thing.”
CHAPTER 5
TAMPA BAY, FLORIDA
ELI BECKER WOULD have never answered the call if he had checked his calendar ahead of time.
Same day every year.
“Have you heard anything?” Abraham had asked.
Of course Eli hadn’t, mainly because he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d poked around for any news.
There had never been any news. Not a squeak, not a peep. Nothing.
“No,” he had replied. “And I won’t. You know I won’t.”
He could hear the man’s breaths over the line, every exhale a near sigh. A dozen seconds or so of this, and then, like always, a whispered “Thank you” and a click as the call went dead.
Eli tried to refocus on his job. As an analyst for the CIA, his workload was never ending, but every time he received this particular call, his mind would wander afterward. There was guilt for not having checked like he long ago promised he would, anger that the calls had not stopped, and, as much as he hated to admit it, curiosity. Why had he been unable to learn anything? Of all the people in the world, he was one of those best placed to uncover any information he might want.
He’d known before he pushed back from his desk that he would give it another go.
Just one more time, he’d told himself. I owe him that much.
Now, forty-eight hours later, he wished he’d left it alone. The unfamiliar woman’s voice on the phone moments before had said they knew what he’d been looking into and would come after him. She said she could buy him a little time, an hour or two at most, but if he valued his life, he had to leave as soon as he could. She didn’t have to tell him who “they” were. He may not have known their names, but he knew what they were capable of. He believed the woman, and had never been so scared in his life.
The photograph he’d been looking at when she called was still on his screen. He stared at it, knowing he should purge it from his system, burn his hard drive, and dump the ashes in the Chesapeake Bay, but he couldn’t. Despite the trouble he was now in, he had made a promise.
So instead, he spent ten minutes recording a video message and then copied the pic, the message, and the other information he had discovered onto a micro disk. Once that was done, he stashed his computer in its hidey-hole, made a quick call to his office to say he wouldn’t be in that evening, and took a shuttle bus to Dulles International Airport.
There, he rented a car using a false ID and a valid but equally bogus credit card, and headed into the streets of Herndon around the airport, turning randomly left and right until he was sure no one was following him. At a convenience store just off the tollway, he purchased a disposable phone and a twenty-five-dollar phone card, then continued east to the Tyson Galleria at Tysons Corner, where he parked in a lower level of the garage, tucked the keys under the rental’s front seat, and got out.
The mall was busy but not packed, so he was able to make his way across it to the attached Ritz-Carlton Hotel without any problems. At the concierge desk, he arranged for a 2:00 p.m. cab to the airport, and then used a computer in the business center to purchase a ticket on the 3:50 p.m. flight to Tampa for Charles Young, the name on the false ID he was carrying.
With twenty minutes to wait until the cab arrived, he found a chair in a quiet corner of the lobby and nervously pulled out the new phone.
The line rang four times before—
“Hello?”
“It’s…it’s Eli.”
Nothing, not even the sound of breathing. Finally, Abraham said, “You have heard something.”
A voice in the back of Eli’s mind screamed Hang up now! but he ignored it and said, “Yes, I have.”
CHAPTER 6
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
QUINN, NATE, AND Daeng flew from Copenhagen to London, where Quinn caught the next flight to San Francisco and his two friends headed to Dallas for their next job.
At SFO, he made his way through passport control, cleared Customs, and found Orlando waiting in his BMW at the curb outside the terminal.
“Welcome home,” she said.
He leaned across the center console and kissed her. “Remind me again why we do this?” he said when he finally pulled away.
“Because desk jobs don’t suit us.”
It was true. There was a definite rush in doing the job of a cleaner, a living on the edge that could never be reached sitting in a fourteenth-floor management meeting. But Quinn had never been in it solely for that reason, or, for that matter, the money, which was generous to say the least. He’d excelled at being a cleaner because no other profession utilized his abilities more thoroughly and filled the place inside him that kept him grounded to the world, that made him forget, if only for a little while, how out of place he often felt with the rest of humanity. Well, most of it, anyway.
Orlando understood him. Nate did, too, usually. And Daeng. And—something he never anticipated—so did his sister, Liz. There was a handful of others in the business he also got along with well, but beyond that, he felt like he never quite belonged.
“So when’s our appointment with Helen?” he asked as they headed north into the city.
“I was told she wouldn’t be able to fit us in until early next week.”
“Next week? I don’t think so.”
“Good, then we’re in sync,” she said. “I thought maybe we could just drop in.”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
He smiled. “Have I told you lately how much I love you?”
__________
ONE OF THE things that had troubled Quinn about a potential working relationship with Helen Cho had been the fact she was based in San Francisco, the same city where Orlando and, for all intents and purposes these days, Quinn lived.
It felt too close, too accessible. His previous main employer—the now de
funct Office—had been located in Washington, DC, providing a nice little three-thousand-mile buffer. Quinn had never had to worry about going out for a cup of coffee and running into Peter, the man who had run the organization. While that hadn’t happened yet in San Francisco with Helen, he suspected it was only a matter of time.
On this particular day, though, her proximity was an advantage.
The building Helen’s organization was located in was a five-story structure near the bay. It had but a single street-side entrance—a plain door easily missed by most passersby.
Quinn did the honors of pressing the intercom button.
“Yes,” a male voice answered.
“We’re here to see Helen,” Quinn said.
“I’m sorry. Helen?”
The long flight had sapped much of Quinn’s patience, so it took a good deal of effort not to bite the guy’s head off. “Tell her Quinn and Orlando are here.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but even if a Helen did work here, if you’re not on the schedule, you’re not getting in.”
“I’m going to assume you’re new, or so low ranking you haven’t learned how to get out of your own way, so do yourself a favor—pass the message on to Helen and open the damn door.”
“Sir, I would rather not have to send security out there.”
Quinn stared at the camera, the look on his face deadly serious. “Please, by all means. Send them out.”
There was no immediate response.
After two minutes, Orlando whispered, “I knew I should have stopped to pick up a coffee first.”
“Why aren’t you as angry about this as I am?”
“I am. I’m just cold.”
Another minute.
“We could try shooting out the lock,” she suggested.
“I don’t have my gun.”
“I’m sure there’s something in the trunk that’ll work.”
“We’ll give it another few minutes, then maybe.”
Thirty more seconds.
“We could call the fire department,” she said. “Say we smelled smoke coming from inside. That should get us in.”
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